Water Thicker Than Blood in Civil War

Water Thicker Than Blood in Civil War

BY DANA DURBIN

Rice News Staff
March 25, 1999

“Blood is thicker than water,” goes the old saying, but in the case of the American Civil War, water proved to be thicker than blood.

Such was the argument put forth by historian James McPherson, who delivered the final President’s Lecture Series talk of the year. McPherson was the first Dominique de Menil lecturer, which Rice President Malcolm Gillis announced will now be an annual lecture held as part of the President’s Lecture Series.

The Princeton University history professor is a renowned Civil War scholar whose books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era,” “For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought the Civil War” and his most recent book, “Drawn With the Sword: Reflections on the Civil War.”

In 1861 President Abraham Lincoln, in response to the firing on Fort Sumter by the newly formed Confederate States of America, called on the militia to suppress an insurrection, and leaders of southern states that had not yet seceded were forced to make a decision–remain in the Union or join the Confederacy. Most citizens of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas did not hesitate; they chose the Confederacy, McPherson said.

“‘We must go with our Southern brothers,’ declared the governor of Tennessee,” McPherson said in his speech. “‘Blood is thicker than water,’ echoed a North Carolina newspaper editor. The attorney general of Virginia chimed in with an assertion that Virginians were ‘homogenous with the people of the Confederate states in race,’ while the Northern people were an ‘alien race. … The cotton states swarm with Virginia’s sons and her son’s sons. … They are bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh.'”

While the citizens of Southern states felt a common brotherhood with one another, Northerners were bound in their belief that the legitimization of the Confederacy would destroy not just the Union, but the foundations on which America had been built. McPherson cited a Philadelphia newspaper editor who, in June 1861, declared “we are fighting to preserve our republican institutions … to establish the authority of the Constitution and laws over violence and anarchy … and for the great fundamental principle of republican government–the right of the majority to rule.”

These two points of view frame the competing forms of Confederate and Union nationalism at play during the Civil War: ethnic and civic nationalism, McPherson said. Ethnic nationalism is defined as a sense of identity and loyalty shared by a group of people united in language, religion, culture and a belief in the common genetic descent of the group. Civil nationalism is based on the belief in a common citizenship in a specified territory and a common allegiance to the institutions governing that territory.

By the late 1850s and early 1860s, Southerners were more and more beginning to see themselves a separate people from Northerners, McPherson said. He quoted a Georgia planter who referred to Northerners and Southerners as “two races, which, although claiming a common parentage, have become so entirely separated by climate, by morals … and by estimates so totally opposite of all that constitutes honor … that they can no longer coexist under the same government.”

Southerners truly saw themselves as descended from a different race than Northerners, McPherson said. They believed they were descendants of the Norman conquerors while Northerners were descendants of the Anglo-Saxons.

Southerners like to identify themselves with Normans and other ethnic nations fighting for independence from oppressive rulers, McPherson said. Further, the derogatory language they used to describe Northerners carried ethnic overtones such as vandals and barbarians. Northerners, on the other hand, used language to describe Southerners that was consistent with civic nationalism: rebels and traitors, for example.

With the Union’s ultimate victory in the Civil War, civic nationalism won out over the South’s ethnic nationalism. “Water had proved to be thicker than blood after all,” McPherson said.

The Union’s victory abolished slavery, which McPherson called the “monstrous injustice” that violated the central tenet of civic nationalism–inclusive citizenship.

“The 14th Amendment to the Constitution confirmed one of the most important results of the Civil War and remedied the most blatant defect in American civic nationalism, with the words that ‘all person born or naturalized in the United States’ are citizens and that no state can ‘abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens’ or ‘deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’

“Americans have not always lived up to this principle,” McPherson continued, “but when governed by the better angels of their nature–to borrow a phrase from Lincoln–they have tried.”